Young Adults in Japan See Both Benefits and Harms in Adult Videos, With Men and Women Diverging Sharply

A new study of young adults in Japan has found that men and women share some core beliefs about adult videos but diverge in striking ways when asked to describe what the content gives them and what it takes away. In a cross-sectional survey of 251 Japanese participants with a mean age of 20.71 years, both sexes named satisfaction or relief of sexual desire, pleasure, and crime prevention as the central benefits of adult videos, while both identified incorrect knowledge as a primary harm. Yet men additionally cited sex education as a benefit and addiction as a harm, whereas women singled out stress relief as a benefit and the encouragement of sexual crime as a harm. The study, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, used a framework known as social representations theory to map the shared, common-sense understandings that circulate within social groups and shape how people interpret, evaluate, and justify their media use.

The research team, led by Lim Mengzhen with colleagues including Rere Matsumoto and Alice Pacher, recruited participants through posters on a university campus, directing them via QR code to an online survey hosted on Qualtrics. Of the 251 respondents, 137 were male (54.6 percent) and 109 were female (43.4 percent). A large majority, 204 participants or 81.3 percent, reported using adult videos, and most identified as heterosexual students. The sample was largely secular: 63.3 percent reported no religious affiliation, and 49.8 percent described themselves as completely non-religious. Participants answered two free-association prompts, one asking them to describe the benefits of adult videos in five words or phrases, and another asking them to describe the harms of online sexually explicit material in five words or phrases, alongside demographic questions covering gender, sexual orientation, relationship status, religion, and perceived societal position.

The free-association responses, originally written in Japanese, were translated into English and grouped into conceptual categories. Semantically similar terms, such as the many Japanese expressions for the release or fulfillment of sexual desire, were coded under single labels. To verify the translations and coding decisions, the responses were divided into five subsets and independently reviewed by six bilingual Japanese-English raters, achieving an average pairwise agreement rate of 87.64 percent. The researchers then applied prototypical analysis using IRaMuTeQ software, which organizes elicited terms into a matrix based on two parameters: how frequently each term appeared, and how important it was considered, with importance inferred from the order in which participants wrote each phrase. Terms that cleared thresholds for both frequency and importance were classified as central core elements, meaning the most widely agreed-upon and deeply rooted beliefs within each group.

The context for the study is a country where adult videos are deeply embedded in everyday life. Japan ranked 11th worldwide in total traffic to Pornhub according to the 2025 Year in Review, and average engagement time per visit rose from 9 minutes 42 seconds to 11 minutes 2 seconds within a single year, among the longest durations globally. Earlier survey data cited in the paper indicate that 97 percent of Japanese men and 35.9 percent of women reported using adult videos at least once in the past month. The authors note that the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of artificial intelligence have reshaped the landscape further: traffic to major platforms surged during lockdowns, homegrown production expanded through platforms such as OnlyFans and the Japanese service MyFans.jp, and AI-enabled hyper-realistic content raised new ethical and legal concerns around non-consensual deepfakes.

The shared findings are notable because most existing research on adult videos has focused on harms, often from expert and Western perspectives, leaving the perceived benefits that sustain use largely unexamined. Both male and female respondents in this study framed adult videos as delivering immediate gratification for sexual, emotional, and pleasure needs. The authors connect this to research on instant gratification, which links adult video use with higher delay discounting, meaning a tendency to prioritize immediate rewards over long-term outcomes. They also situate the findings in Japanese social conditions: sexual activity among university students has declined, by 16 percent for male and 25 percent for female respondents according to the Japanese Association for Sex Education, and limited romantic engagement, particularly among men described as herbivore men who reject traditional aggressive masculinity, may make adult videos a convenient outlet when conventional sexual experiences are less accessible.

The perception of adult videos as a form of crime prevention, endorsed by both sexes, is perhaps the most culturally distinctive finding. The authors draw on prior work suggesting that men may see pornography as a venting mechanism or safety valve that allows fantasies to be expressed in a fictional space rather than acted out, with some arguing it functions as a seawall protecting women and children from sexual harm. Women, according to earlier studies, may view it as a safe space to explore desires in a society where female sexuality is stigmatized. The paper traces this belief to historical Japanese norms in which men’s sexual desires were often considered natural and uncontrollable, and to postwar practices such as prostitution used to prevent sexual crimes. The authors also suggest that as gender roles shift with increasing female workforce participation, some young men may seek affirmation through adult videos as a socially acceptable outlet that maintains gendered power dynamics without direct harm.

The sex-specific findings map closely onto gendered social scripts in Japan. Male respondents’ citation of sex education as a benefit may reflect expectations that men take the lead in romantic and sexual contexts: surveys indicate a majority of secondary and tertiary students believe men should lead women in these situations, and 43.6 percent of men in their twenties, compared with only 6.7 percent of women, reported initiating sex. With formal sex education often limited by taboos and institutional guidelines such as the Hadome Kitei, which restricts teaching about sexual intercourse in elementary and middle schools, men may treat adult videos as an accessible, if imperfect, source of practical knowledge. Women’s citation of stress relief aligns with the culturally specific concept of iyashi, or healing and emotional comfort, and with research showing that women face social restrictions in openly managing sexual and emotional stress, making brief virtual spaces a socially acceptable coping outlet.

On the harm side, the divergence is equally telling. Men cited addiction, which the authors link to the convenience and privacy of smartphone access, noting that 91 percent of Japanese Pornhub users reach the site via mobile devices and that greater exposure may normalize daily viewing. The authors caution, however, that future research should distinguish habitual consumption from clinical addiction. Women, by contrast, referenced the encouragement of sexual crime, a perception the authors connect to lived experience: government statistics indicate that 13.6 percent of women, compared with 3.6 percent of men, report being victims of molestation offenses on trains, a primary mode of transportation in urban areas such as Tokyo. As female engagement with adult videos increases, exposure to content depicting molestation, stalking, rape, and harassment may resonate with these real-world experiences, leading women to perceive such content as normalizing sexual violence against them.

A final observation concerns vocabulary. Participants produced more words and phrases describing benefits than harms, which the authors interpret through the principle that a greater variety of terms reflects greater familiarity with a phenomenon. The richness of benefit-related language may stem from the normalization of adult videos in Japanese media and their historical accessibility through convenience stores and bookstores, as well as the wide range of genres available. Discussions of harms, by contrast, remain constrained by social taboos and politicization; the paper notes that Japanese lawmakers advocating for teen protection from adult videos have faced ridicule from peers. This asymmetry, the authors suggest, may reveal a gap between public discourse, in which sex is treated as taboo, and private perception, in which many individuals view adult videos more positively than negatively.

The authors are careful to spell out the study’s limitations. Its exploratory design and convenience sample of university students limit generalizability to the broader Japanese population, and the sensitive, taboo nature of the subject means self-reported answers may be shaped by social desirability. The study focused exclusively on live-action adult videos, excluding popular alternatives such as erotic manga, anime, novels, and audio content that some women, in particular, may prefer. The authors also acknowledge that terms such as stress relief and pleasure, though used interchangeably in everyday language, may reflect distinct psychological experiences. Even so, the findings carry practical weight: they suggest sex education programs should address the misconceptions that both men and women already recognize, and that public health interventions should be tailored to gender-specific concerns, namely addiction among men and fears of sexual crime among women, rather than treating young adults’ perceptions of adult videos as uniform.

Subject of Research: Sex-difference social representations of the benefits and harms of adult videos among young adults in Japan

Article Title: Benefits and Harms of Adult Videos: A Sex Difference Social Representations Analysis Among Young Adults in Japan

Article References: Mengzhen, L., Matsumoto, R., Pacher, A., Hirayama, M., Davies, S., & Benjamin, J. (2026). Benefits and Harms of Adult Videos: A Sex Difference Social Representations Analysis Among Young Adults in Japan. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03543-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03543-w

Keywords: adult videos, Japan, social representations, sex differences, young adults, pornography, sex education, crime prevention, addiction, stress relief, prototypical analysis, Archives of Sexual Behavior